Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

will respond to those who are the interpreters of the word of Allah. They supply the voice of God to the nonpsychotic. This authority is a powerful alternative to delusion formation, which is a device only available to the psychotics among us.

Hatred for the devil has always been one hallmark of love of God. Those obsessed with hatred of evil, and apprised of the identity of the agents of evil, need generate no delusions to rationalize their hatred. The mass population, eager for some justification for their deprivation, is directed to viewing the United States as a prime example of the hand of Satan operating through the imperialist state. In addition, the people see on television the sinful lifestyle of the infidel that is so tempting to their children. Encouraged by the assurances of their religious leaders, they supply their children with an alternative passion. The ticket to the better life is a suicide mission. The child’s place in paradise is assured, and their parents will find increased comforts at home supplied by benefactors from Iran and Iraq. They pursue and extinguish the enemy at the behest of their religious leaders and with the reassurance that planting a bomb in a school will be serving their God. No ideological leaders besides the religious ones have this enormous leverage.

Religions, or their ultranationalist equivalents, have the power to choose and identify “enemies.” They do so by defining evil or heretic populations: Jews, Irish Protestants/Catholics, Serbs/ Croats, Muslims/Hindus. Genocide sanctioned by dogma or orthodoxy and rationalized by political leaders can then be declared a means of purification, a defense of principle—in the service of God or the good—and even an act of survival. Religious leaders have enormous special powers to influence the believer far beyond that afforded secular leaders.

First, religion has “the Word.” The prestige of the Church bureaucracy resides in its self-appointed position as intermediary between God and his subjects. Their authority is both interpretive and directive. Most of us do not hear the voice of God and are not privy to his wants. The power of religious leaders resides in their arrogation of the capacity and right to interpret the divine text.

Second, the Church is an educator. The Church bureaucracy, in its self-perpetuated role as interpreter of the divine text—whether the Koran or the Bible—arrogates a responsibility to inform and instruct the layman. The word of God is what the leaders say it is. They define the appropriate beliefs and the proper code of conduct. As God’s instruments, religious leaders are regarded with the kind of fear and awe that inspire obedience. We now have a culturally accepted alternative to paranoid delusion, a method of receiving instructions from God and following his commandments. This power allows religious leaders to locate the source of misery in the populace; define the enemy, the infidel or the anti-Christ; and command action, whether crusade, jihad, or an act of personal martyrdom.

Third, faith supplies power. It demands allegiance and obedience beyond the tests of reason. Faith is demanded in most religious observers. One suspension of reason can facilitate the next. If one believes that Moses literally received the tablets of the law from God on Mount Sinai, then one is prepared to accept the delivery of the golden plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York. And one can believe that the Reverend Jim Jones will lead us out of the modern wilderness.78 We unfairly denigrate the faith of believers in new religions, but the same suspension of logic is required in the traditional religions. The miracles of the Old and New Testaments would seem strange indeed if newly presented in the twenty-first century.

The power of faith is in its ability to counter all the impulses of instinct and the directives of rational thinking. Even the ubiquitous fear of death can be overcome by the promises of faith, whether through fusion with Christ, enshrinement in Valhalla, or admission to the earthly paradise, with its corporal and carnal pleasures, promised by Islam.

Finally, religion supplies passion. Religion (or ultranationalism) does more than define the enemy and rationalize the hatred. It supplies the passion. The kind of passion that allows for torture and cruelty is borrowed from religious ecstasy. Very little besides terror, sexual passion, or religious fervor can support the excesses of group hatred. The passion supplied by religion sustains hatred over a lifetime and across generations. The institution of religion is particularly well endowed with all the ingredients necessary to supply the tinder that ignites group hatred.

Another traditional role of religion that has made it useful to secular authorities is its ability to bring comfort to the masses, and comfort may be used in the service of civil control. Since life for the masses has historically been one of misery and toil, often because of exploitation by the privileged minority, the comfort offered by religion can serve as an emollient to the masses, making misery tolerable. One argument for the ready acceptance by secular powers of an alternative and potentially competitive leadership, the Church, has been the usefulness of religion in stabilizing a feudal and exploitative state. The promise of an afterlife makes the here and now more bearable. Poverty may be endurable, even preferable, if it is true that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the poor man find justice in heaven.

For years, one of the intended or incidental effects of culturally sanctioned antisemitism in the Catholic and medieval cultures of Europe was the stabilizing effect it offered the state. The Church encouraged the perpetuation of antisemitism, “the longest hatred,”79 for its utilitarian effects. The value of the Jews as scapegoats was in their capacity to divert the masses from the proper sources of their despair, a miserable and impoverished existence. This status quo was easy to maintain when the Church was powerful and unified, the states were weak and diverse, and there was no powerful middle class.

With the Reformation, the creation of the modern